Art generating renewable energy

Currents, waves, tides, temperature changes between the surface and the depths: there are potentially many ways to convert marine energy into electricity. However, the challenges of designing renewable energy plants are often accompanied by critical considerations regarding their environmental impact, which includes both other living beings and the landscape inhabited by humans. «We thought: why not involve creative and interdisciplinary groups to transform the plants into works of art that become attractions?». Robert Ferry founded the Land Art Generator Initiative in 2009 together with Elisabeth Monoian, a non-profit organisation focused on sustainable design, which is now among the most followed in the world. The next Open Call Competition, which will be announced in September and begin in January 2025, will be aimed at the direct prototyping and construction of art and renewable energy projects on a major coastal site. We met them to learn more.

The LAGI story begins in Dubai in 2008. Why did you decide to move there?

RF: Elizabeth and I had met two years earlier in Pittsburgh (USA), we got married in 2008, and decided to go to the United Arab Emirates to start our life together. Elizabeth found work as a design instructor at a university, and I was involved in architectural projects, particularly in Masdar City, which at the time was an ambitious zero-impact development project. Once we arrived, we were pleased to discover a rich tradition of landscape art there, plenty of potential for renewable energy, especially solar, and extremely ambitious development projects. We wanted to combine all these elements to address what we considered a pressing global problem of the transition to renewable energy: their aesthetic impact. Around the world, communities oppose the approval of these projects because of their implications for the land and the landscape view. We, therefore, wanted to propose an alternative, and we thought:

Why can’t energy landscapes also attract people to places? We can celebrate them and create beautiful constructions that future generations can visit to return to what could be the most important moment in human history when we saved ourselves from the brink of our own destruction.

Perhaps it’s a bit too grandiose, but that’s what we had in mind.

Robert Ferry and Elizabeth Monoian are the co-founding directors of the Land Art Generator. Robert Ferry is a professional architect engaged in designing and managing projects for new sustainable urban settlements. Elisabeth Monoian has taught Art and Design at several universities in Dubai. Both graduated from Carnegie Mellon University. LAGI has received several grants from the National Endowment for the Arts and was awarded the J.M.K. Innovation Prize, a programme of the J.M. Kaplan Fund. Innovation Prize, un programma del J.M. Kaplan Fund. Their publications include: “Regenerative Infrastructures” (Prestel Publishing), “The Time is Now: Public Art of the Sustainable City” (Page One Publishing), “New Energies” (Prestel Publishing), “Powering Places: LAGI Santa Monica” (Prestel Publishing), “Energy Overlays” (Hirmer Publishing), “Return to the Source” (Prestel Publishing), and “A Field Guide to Renewable Energy Technologies”.

One of LAGI’s most important activities is the Open Call Competitions: how do they work?

EM: Calls can come from any city in the world. Once received, we work closely with local partners in that city: government, various communities, art groups and organisations, and universities to establish the best intervention site together. We develop a design project that truly responds to the needs of local groups: there is always the request to work with renewable energy and other sustainable systems in creative ways, but there are also other elements that come into play depending on the site and local culture. We then launch the free open call on a global scale, and it is truly interdisciplinary: the ideal scenario is when artists, engineers, scientists, landscapers, and architects work together. But of course, individuals can also participate. When the competition closes, there is a local and international jury committee that selects the best projects, which are evaluated completely anonymously. At the end, we publish the best contributions and essays on the entire process in volumes with global distribution.

We hope to shift the public debate from doom and gloom to an aspiration and optimistic desire to design and wish for a better world and act to help make it possible.

By involving people in this wonderful exercise, not only through imagination but also the work to make these ideas real, we can take control of our future and truly inspire.

Do the winning projects of the competition receive an invitation for construction, or not?

EM: We are moving in that direction. We have always had a very substantial cash prize, and we are very pleased to say that most of the projects submitted in Abu Dhabi in 2019 are under construction in Houston, Texas, in the United States. It is actually exciting. The 2020 competition included a cash prize for the prototyping and construction of the winning project, and it will be the same in 2025.

Since 2010, how has the world of renewables changed, and how has your organisation changed?

RF: We are approaching the end of our second decade of activity: it’s quite a survival milestone, especially since there have been many advances in renewable energy technology science, and their spread has helped the cost curve drop dramatically. We continue to gather and monitor changes in the sector in the “Field Guide to Renewable Energy Technologies”: of course, many of the interesting companies from the first edition have failed because it is a difficult market for cutting-edge technologies, but there is always something new and interesting. We are excited about building-integrated photovoltaic technology: now that the price of solar has become one dollar per watt, communities can be involved. In recent years, there have been really positive steps regarding the incentive for renewable energy concurrently with the peak of fossil fuel demand. We still have a lot of work to do. But we are optimistic, and we are excited to be living in this historical moment and to be able to contribute to inspiring people to push and further advance this process.

The last open call dedicated to the sea was in 2016 in Santa Monica. What do you remember about it?

RF: Projects such as “The Pipe” emerged from that competition, an electromagnetic desalination plant covered with beautiful solar panels: an interesting project because it managed the waste brine from the desalination process by creating a public benefit from this product, which is now seen only as a pollutant and reducing the impact on the marine environment. These are the innovative and creative ideas that teams continue to propose. Every year we have had works of art on wave and tidal energy. We are really excited to see how it will continue.

What have you learned in these fifteen years?

EM: The most important lesson is the capacity for human innovation. Design teams love challenges, love to dive in, and give their best. Every time we close a competition, I tear up because it is so moving to see the great work of those who have designed, like professors who have pushed their students to participate, and to see that people all over the world want to solve the worst problems. And that is the daily lesson: people are extraordinary. We cannot make it without human beings. RF: It saddens us to see people around the world wanting to solve big problems, and it hurts us to see people losing hope in the human community.  We wish everyone could experience what Elizabeth just described, being full of optimism for the future: seeing young generations engaged in this activity is truly inspiring. And I believe that since 2008, our perspective has originally been a bit techno-optimistic about our ability to succeed because climate change is not a technological problem; it is a social problem that can be solved with a healthy mix of technological optimism and engineering solutions, and learning from low-carbon indigenous cultures. It is not about one or the other: we must both reduce our carbon footprint and change our lifestyle while focusing on technology that replaces our current fossil fuel sources. We are frustrated by the binary debate about these two elements because in the end it has to be both.